If you've been following the news surrounding Apple's relationship with KDE developers and Apple's implementation of KHTML into Safari, then it's almost inevitable that you've developed your opinion based on false or misleading news or comments surrounding the issue. Kurt Pfeifle has authored an 18 point article (blog version), which clarifies the issue in hopes that the confusion will stop and that people will generate their opinions based on the facts... rather than a whole lot of conjecture as is currently the case.

"13. A KHTML developer clarifies in his blog that this is not going to happen any time soon  because of the de facto fork of WebCore from KHTML, which just doesnt give an easy path to integrate Apples WebCore changes back into KHTML. He also does not hide the fact that he is pretty pissed off by clueless user comments which give all the credits to Apple but dont acknowledge the KHTML developers work who mostly work for free in their spare time on KHTML."

This is where the problem occurred. This summary conveniently leaves out the fact that, although he admitted that Apple were doing everything by the book, the overall tone of the posting was very dismissive of Apple and it was quite apparent what his opinion of Apple was.

Sure, he didn't directly attack Apple in specific words, but everybody reading it thought to themselves "here's a KDE developer who is unhappy with Apple". Couple that with a legitimate complaint, and it's not hard to see where the controversy came from.

That seems like a good enough reason. People have been making a big deal of it and so Kurt wanted to set the record straight.

There's a lot of potential reasons for things to happen as they did. Over time a number of things have happened with Webcore and people have asked me when they would get into Quanta. In turn I've asked KHTML developers and it always gets met with a degree of frustration on the part of the developer that works with us. The projected inclusion of features and fixes continued to be further out and finally missed KDE 3.4 and then it got to where we were being told that it may not be possible to include these features at all. Follow up on the details if you want to understand it. If you look into the issues from a developer standpoint it's hard not to be dissappointed. I imagine it's more impacting if you're the one trying to interface with Apple.

Whatever the reason and whoever you want to point blame at the result is the same. I'm not going to second guess Apple's intentions here but the net result has been a loss of a lot of improvements for KDE users because the current process has made it increasingly difficult to sort out. It was exciting that Apple chose KHTML, but it would be better if we could share changes. If you're using KDE and KHTML it's something that affects you. So it's certainly important to let people know what is happening.

Remember there is a difference between complying to the letter and complying to the spirit of an agreement. A fork is compliant with an open source license for instance, but hardly the same as a collaboration. The license is the legal agreement and so people who think everything is fine if a legal compliance is there are missing the point.

It is also strange that they do not work on khtml as a plattform independend solution, hire khtml programmers, but take khtml and mess it up with proprietary bindings. Apples guerilla marketing department had a lot to do to reverse the accusation back into one againgst of KDE I guess.

It is no wonder that Safari is more advanced if they take khtml and hire full time developers.